Academic - Staff

I trained as a Geographer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre where I completed a PhD on “caste dominance and territory in South India” in 2013. After a year of teaching at the Sorbonne, I joined the London School of Economics (LSE) for a three-year postdoctoral programme on “inequality and poverty in India” in the Department of Anthropology.

I completed my Ph.D in history from the University of Delhi and am currently Newton International Fellow at SIAS. I'm an economic and social historian working on south Asia. My work examines the history of labour outside large factories in what is now called the informal sector. My doctoral dissertation explored the changing world of handloom weavers in south India – and the economic restructuring of the industry – from the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century.

Nayanika Mathur is an Anthropologist of South Asia with wide-ranging research and teaching interests in the anthropology of politics, development, environment, law, human-animal studies, and research methods. I was educated at the Universities of Delhi (B.A. and M.A.) and Cambridge (MPhil and PhD). I have held postdoctoral research fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy at Cambridge’s Centre for the Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

I originally joined the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme as a departmental lecturer in October 2010. In September 2017 I took up Oxford’s Associate Professorship in the International Relations of South Asia, divided between Area Studies and the Department of Politics and International Relations. I hold a Governing Body Fellowship at St Antony’s College and am Chair of the Board of Examiners for both the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies.

Academic - Affiliate

Elizabeth Chatterjee taught on the MSc in Contemporary India between 2012 and 2015. She is now a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago, where she is part of an interdisciplinary project on climate change and 'the limits of the numerical'. This extends Liz’s existing research on energy policy, environmental politics, and the Asian Anthropocene, alongside which she continues to write on infrastructure and India’s transforming state institutions in the liberalization era.

I joined SIAS in October 2011, where I was a researcher on the ESRC/DfID funded project: ‘The Materiality of Rice’, led by Professor Barbara Harriss-White. I am now a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, and convene and lecture the geography MSc elective, Global Environmental Change and Food Security.

Both food and a healthy environment are essential for human existence. Food production at the scale required to feed the present population inevitably damages the environment. This damage is at such a scale to seriously threaten human existence.

Senior Research Fellow, Area Studies; Co-ordinator South Asian Research Cluster

I joined SIAS in 2007 but I joined Oxford in 1987 after 7 years teaching social science to medical doctors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. My interests are Political economy; agriculture, energy and food; aspects of deprivation; India’s informal capitalism; rural and local development; low carbon transition. I used to teach Indian political economy on the MSc in Contemporary India. (Before that – M Phil in Development Studies: core course, options in gender and development, Indian political economy, health and development, rural development)

I completed my doctoral studies in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2008. I also undertook a postdoctoral research (2008-2011) in anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. My work, through long-term empirical fieldwork and critical engagement with social theory, develops theoretical and empirical insights into the political economy of poverty, violence and development in India in the context of the growing Maoist insurgency and counterinsurgency.

I trained as a social anthropologist at Edinburgh, UCL and the LSE, and joined the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies in Oxford in 2008. My research is based in rural Andhra Pradesh, Southeast India and is primarily concerned with Dalits (earlier known as ‘Untouchables’), especially Dalit women. My work looks at different forms of inequality (caste, class and gender), education, identity, affirmative action and labour relations.